Available From UC Press

Caroline Bancroft History Prize 2021, Denver Public Library
Armitage-Jameson Prize 2021, Coalition of Western Women's History
David J. Weber Prize 2021, Western History Association
W. Turrentine Jackson Prize 2021, Western History Association

Tiny You tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion. While Americans have rapidly changed their minds about sex education, pornography, arts funding, gay teachers, and ultimately gay marriage, opposition to legalized abortion has only grown. As other socially conservative movements have lost young activists, the pro-life movement has successfully recruited more young people to its cause. Jennifer L. Holland explores why abortion dominates conservative politics like no other cultural issue. Looking at anti-abortion movements in four western states since the 1960s—turning to the fetal pins passed around church services, the graphic images exchanged between friends, and the fetus dolls given to children in school—she argues that activists made fetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images, and dolls they held in their hands and made the fight against abortion the primary bread-and-butter issue for social conservatives. Holland ultimately demonstrates that the success of the pro-life movement lies in the borrowed logic and emotional power of leftist activism.

Jennifer L. Holland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.

"Tiny You is a game-changer. Jennifer L. Holland brilliantly excavates the stories of the low-profile grassroots activists who built the pro-life crusade—not through the dramatic headline-stealing attacks on abortion clinics, but through unrelenting organizational work in their homes, churches, and shared community spaces. We see how this activism, revealed as lived everyday experience, formed the nucleus of shared white political identity in the era of the culture wars. With a treasure trove of personal narratives acquired through oral and archival history, Holland documents how the movement coalesced around 'fetal civil rights' and made opposition to abortion the most successful single-issue campaign in twentieth-century American history."—Michelle Nickerson, author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right

"U.S. women’s historians have long clamored for more scholarship on women’s experiences in western states and on the social history of religious women. Our current political moment asks us to consider how libertarians and evangelical Christians forged a powerful alliance. In clear and compelling prose, Holland examines the rise of anti-abortion activism in the western United States and offers a kaleidoscopic history of this multiracial, multireligious, and politically diverse region. This is an important book."—Karissa Haugeberg, author of Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century

"This outstanding book respects the diverse religious convictions of anti-abortion activists (Catholic, Mormon, and evangelical Protestant) and shows how their language of justice distinguished their success. Yet though they claimed to be leading a pro–civil rights campaign, Holland emphasizes their consistent anti-feminist arguments and brings forward the implicit racist assumptions of the overwhelmingly white movement."—Kathy Olmsted, author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism